Louimène

On Thursdays, the Labasti market takes over a small section of National Route #3 about five miles south of downtown Mibalè. Merchants of all sorts spill into both sides of the street. Some of them are hawking loads of produce, bigger or smaller, in sacks or baskets or simply piles. There’s clothing, both old and used, hardware arranged in racks or on carts, cosmetics, laundry products, and groceries.

Vendors stroll up and down the road with bundles of brooms or pyramids of home-made chairs loaded on their heads or with homemade racks of belts or sunglasses. Pill-sellers weave through the crowd, their buckets piled high with medications. Bread and snacks of various sorts, both packaged and fresh-fried, are sold as well. Soft drinks and hard liquor. Cooks offer full meals: beans with rice or cornmeal and sauces thick with meat and vegetables. There’s a place to sell livestock at the market’s northern end.

In other words, one can find most of the things that the ordinary days of life require.

Parked vehicles line both sides of the road, adding to the traffic: large livestock trucks from Pòtoprens sent from slaughterhouses in the capital, beat-up pick-up trucks of the sort that carry people and merchandise throughout Haiti, and clumps of motorcycle taxis waiting for fares. Route #3, the route through central Haiti, is now the main – really the only – road out of Pòtoprens northward. The passage of buses and trucks is constant during daylight hours, though only during daylight hours ever since gangs took control of the entrance to the metropolitan area just below Mòn Kabrit. Passage through the market can involve a lot of horns and a lot of yelling.

About fifty or hundred yards south of the market along the road from the main market space, a footpath branches off to the east. It’s a couple of feet wide, made of hard-packed soil. But it’s uneven. Heavy tropical rains wash irregular contours out of it. The thick roots that enter the path from both sides hold the dirt in places, but only in places, which only serves to make the path less even. Dark mud collects in spots whenever it rains.

The path passes three or four small metal-roofed houses on each side before it comes to farmland. The area around Labasti is fertile, and as this path cuts downward towards a narrow, muddy stream, it passes along a couple of patches of corn, pigeon peas, and manioc. Further in, larger spaces are planted with plantain and sugarcane, the crop that has come to dominate in the area. The stream is easy to ford, and the path climbs the opposite bank, continuing upward past a few more homes before a large field of cane opens up on the left.

On the right, a few feet above the road, is a shack falling apart in the middle of an abandoned-looking yard. Behind it and slightly above it is Louimène’s small home.

***

Louimene graduated from CLM in December 2014. Her experience in the program was unusual. She was part of it for just nine months, rather than the usual eighteen, and she received an investment from Fonkoze much less than what her fellow members received. But, even so, she speaks of CLM as an important source of her success.

She joined the program later than the other members of the group she eventually graduated with because, right after she was selected, she left Labasti, where she and her partner Lucner had been living. She went off to care for her sick mother in Bouli, an area in the mountains of northwestern Boukankare, the commune north and west of Mibalè. By the time she returned to Labasti, the program had started, and her place in it had been taken by another member.

It was too bad. She, Lucner, and their two boys could hardly have needed CLM any more than they did. They were living in an ajoupa, a straw tent-like structure, in the corner of a field that did not belong to them. It belonged to a farmer who would hire Lucner to help in his fields. Lucner earned 50 gourds on the days that the farmer gave him work. That was about $1 at the time, and it was the couple’s only income. It had to feed two adults and two small kids.

***

Their life hadn’t always been that way. When they met, Lucner was a successful small-time merchant in Pòtoprens. Louimène was a maid in a home near his business. Lucner fell for her, and he lights up when he tells the story. He liked her as soon as he saw her, and he decided to get to know her better.

Louimène’s father died when she was 14. Her mother could not afford to take care of Louimène, so she sent her to live with a family in Pòtoprens. Louimène left the family within a year. She went off looking for a job because she did not like the way the family treated her. “I was hungry all the time. They had a business selling boiled cassava root as a snack. They would feed me the leftover roots that hadn’t been sold.”

She found a job as a maid, which she soon left for what she thought would be a better one. One day, when she was not yet 16, she was sent to his business to buy some rice. Lucner volunteered to deliver the rice himself, leaving the business and his wallet in Louimène’s hands. That wallet functioned as his cash register, and it held all the money from the business, over 7,000 gourds. “I wanted to see whether she was honest.” When he returned from the errand, he found that all the money was still there.

He gave her 500 gourds as a thank-you gesture, and she used that money to buy cookies and crackers, which she began to sell. Soon she had turned those 500 gourds into more than 1,000, even while she continued to work as a maid. “I liked her right away, but when I saw how smart she was I decided to try to make her mine.”

Then one of his brothers became sick, and Lucner returned with Louimène to his home community in the hills east of Labasti, to help care of the man. They spent almost everything they had nursing Lucner’s brother back to health, but then they had to leave the cluster of homes where Lucner’s family lived because Louimène and Lucner’s sister could not get along.

They moved into a room of a house that belonged to a wealthier neighbor, but it wasn’t long before the neighbor wanted them out. “He told us to open the door and the windows to let the mosquitos out.” It was as though they were attracting bugs.

So, the couple threw up the ajoupa, a one-room, tent-like structure that Haitian farmers build out of straw. They got permission to put theirs in a corner of Lucner’s employer’s field. Usually, an ajoupa serves as a temporary shelter for farmers while they work in fields too far from their home to go back and forth every day. But for struggling families like Louimène’s, an ajoupa can become a long-term home.

The ajoupa was the only home that she and Lucner had, and it stood on a plot of land that wasn’t theirs. They had no livestock or other assets of their own, and they depended on the 50 gourds Lucner earned on the days when he could earn it. The CLM staff members who saw them during the selection process gave them the highest possible score for food insecurity, “food-insecure with hunger.” They were going hungry much of the time.

***

But shortly after Louimène returned to Labasti from caring for her mother, a CLM member in a neighboring community decided to move to Pòtoprens, abandoning the program. Hilaire, the case manager who was working in Louimène’s neighborhood, strongly advocated for bringing her in it to replace the woman who left, even though about half of the program’s eighteen months had already passed.

The CLM team was able to recuperate the roofing tin from the woman who had left, pulling it off the framework it had already been nailed to. The staff also retrieved one of her two goats, a small pig, and 1,000 of the 7,200 gourds of cash stipends she had received. All this was given to Louimène, but nothing else. It didn’t give her much to work with.

Haitians say that someone can have to “bat dlo pou fè bè.” That means to churn water to make butter. It’s a way to talk of making something out of nothing. And Louimène and Lucner started churning water for all they were worth.

Lucner kept working hard in in their neighbor’s fields, even as he took primary responsibility for the livestock that Louimène received from the program. Louimène invested the 1,000 gourds she was given into a small commerce. She would buy spaghetti and canned milk, put it on her head in Labasti, and walk the five miles into Mibalè, calling out her wares and making sales all along the way. Normally, she’d sell out by the time she got to town. She’d buy merchandise there for the next day and carry it home. If she was busy — doing laundry or attending a CLM training — Lucner would do the job instead. The business began to grow, and Louimène started investing some of its sales into additional products. On Thursdays, she would find a busy corner of the market to sit in, put her basket of merchandise on the ground in front of her, and sell what she could.

She and Lucner talked to the landowner about the ajoupa they were living in. They needed his permission to improve it. Often even farmers who are open to allowing a poor squatter put up an ajoupa on their land will object if the squatter adds a tin roof. It makes the structure seem more permanent. And Louimène and Lucner wanted to add not just a solid roof, but a cement latrine. They were eventually able to get permission to do so, in part because of their case manager’s help in the negotiations.

***

When Louimène graduated in December 2014, she and her family were eating two hot meals a day. Louimène reported a clear plan for increasing her regular income – she would sell one of her pigs and use the proceeds to add to her business – and she proudly explained that this plan meant Fonkoze would not need to worry about her anymore.

By then, she had sold her original goat and its young. She had acquired a second smaller pig but had sold the first one. She used the proceeds from the sales of the goats and the first of the pigs to buy a cow, which she wanted because she had a plan for that too. “We needed land, and if you buy a small cow you can hold onto to it. While it grows, you wait for someone to sell a piece of land, and when the chance comes along, you can sell the cow and buy the land.”

And that’s exactly the way that things turned out. After graduation, the man who owned the plot they lived on began to resent the family’s presence. “When he saw our cow, he said that he had given us land to put a house on, but not to graze animals.” He started to hire another man to work in his fields and to pressure Louimène and Lucner to leave. Since they had no place they could go, they put up with his humiliations as best they could.

Eventually, however, they found another landowner with a sudden need for cash. They were able to buy enough of a plot to put their little house on for 12,750 gourds. They sold the cow they had recently bought to get their hands on the money they needed. They disassembled their house and reassembled it on their own land, removing the roofing from the home that they had built and reattaching it. They even spent the extra money and effort necessary to install a simple latrine, having learned of its importance.

One of Lucner’s brothers bought the neighboring plot for a similar amount. But when Lucner made the purchase for himself and Louimèner, he was careful to put Louimène’s name on the receipt, rather than his own. “If anything happens to me, I wouldn’t want Louimène to have problems with my family.”

***

That is when things started to get more difficult for the couple. Lucner got sick. He was unable to work for a couple of months. Medical expenses and life without the income he earned forced the couple to sell off their second pig and, eventually, the small commerce that Louimène had managed to create. By the time Lucner was working again, the couple was back almost to square one. They had their own house, and it was covered with a good tin roof, but they had no assets and no small commerce.

They found themselves driven to make a difficult decision: Their children would move in with Louimène’s mother, in Bouli. Louimène would seek work as a maid in downtown Mibalè until she could save enough money to return to business.

She did so for a year, earning 2,000 gourds per month. “You put up with how they treat you, because you know you won’t be doing the work forever.” She sent much of what she earned to Bouli, to help her mother care for the kids, and she spent most of the rest of her earnings keeping herself and Lucner fed.

Once Lucner’s health returned, he could contribute as well, and they could start to dream of bringing their children home. Louimène wanted to bring them back as soon as she had saved enough to go back into business. Looking back, she says, “When they are with me, I can take better care of them.”

Things improved for the couple and their children after they moved back to Labasti together. Though they still had no farmland of their own, they were able to rent a plot. Lucner farmed that plot and worked a second plot as a sharecropper, so they did not depend on day wages exclusively.

Louimène continued to earn money through small commerce. When she first went back into business, she followed the same plan that had worked for her previously. She filled a basket with a couple of products, put it on her head, and hiked five miles into town, selling as she went. But she managed her money carefully, and she soon had too many products to carry around on her head. She decided to start selling out of her home instead.

She sold a range of basic groceries, and she was the family’s principal earner, bringing in enough to feed the family and make weekly contributions to her savings club, or “sòl,” Every week, members of the sòl make a set contribution, and one of them receives the whole pot. Whenever it was Louimène’s turn to receive the pot, she would invest most of it right into her business. Her business would thus grow and shrink cyclically as the date of her receipt of the pot was nearer or farther away. At times, it was nothing more than garlic and bouillon cubes. At other times, she could sell rice, oil, and other staples as well. Its value could vary from as little as 1,500 or 2,000 gourds to as much as 10,000.

But though their income grew only slowly after Louimène graduated, the family’s live changed in important ways. Despite their struggles, they bought a small pig. It was their first investment in new livestock in a couple of years.

And Louimène is quick to talk about another, more important change. She and Lucner married in December 2019. “We got married, and we started going to church.” They couldn’t attend services during the coronavirus crisis, but they prayed with their fellow congregants. Louimène visited neighbors’ homes with other church members every morning.

Between her business and Lucner’s farm income, they also created a different sort of home. They tore down the walls of their shack, which had been made of thin sticks, woven together and covered with mud. They replaced them with walls of palm wood planks in the back and on the two sides, which they painted a creamy orange. They built a new front wall of stones. It was much more solid and attractive than the house it replaced. They also enclosed what had been a covered entry in the front, so the inside of the house was about a third larger than it had been.

Her business was working well, but Lucner’s farming was not. A persistent drought killed a couple of crops. Eventually, he came to doubt whether it was worth replanting. And, so, the couple had to face another difficult decision. Louimène had a brother who was living across the border, in the Dominican Republic. He works for an avocado producer, loading sacks onto trucks, and he told the couple that he could get Lucner a job working with him.

There were just two problems. First, Lucner would need to find 6,000 gourds to pay for the trip across the border. Second, he would have to live away from Louimène and the kids.

Lucner knew he would accept the second problem, as unhappy as it made him. He didn’t think he had a choice, because it was the only way he could think of to earn money to help Louimène take care of their kids. He could not bear not contributing.

The first problem seemed like more of a barrier. He didn’t have the money, and he didn’t know where he’d get it. He felt stuck.

Until Louimène let him know that she had enough money saved up, and that she would give it to him. Lucner went to join his brother-in-law in 2022, and he started to regularly send Louimène as much of his earnings as he could. He visits her and the kids occasionally, and he spent a month with her this past year recovering after an accident, but for the most part the couple must now live apart.

***

And as Louimène herself continued to work hard, her business continued to grow. She kept adding new products. In addition to what she bought in Mibalè, she started selling things she could find at the Labasti market as well. She could buy basic groceries, like rice, beans, sugar, and oil in Labasti. She can buy a moderately large quantity, like a sack or a five-gallon jug, and break it down into the small quantities that her neighbors want. She began buying cooking charcoal, too, 500 gourds’ worth at a time – now less than half of a large sack – and dividing it into 50-gourd bags.

Her business took a big step forward through a friendship she developed with another member of her church. He sells snacks out of his home. Louimène would sometimes send her kids to him for them to buy a treat. One day, he saw how well her business was doing and he approached her with a proposition: he makes bi-monthly buying trips to Elias Piña, the large bi-national market on the border, across from Beladè. He was willing to buy for her as well. He’d even front her the money. It was an easy way for him to increase his sales because he charges her more than he pays. He is basically a retailer with Louimène as his one wholesale customer. And their arrangement enables Louimène to buy more merchandise less expensively than she otherwise could so that her business can grow.

Before each of his trips to Elias Piña, Louimène pays him what she owes him, and they talk about what merchandise she needs. His advances can be as much as 13,000 t0 14,000 gourds, which is a little more than $100. He’ll look for what she asks him for, but he will sometimes see something new that he thinks she’ll be able to sell. This new system keeps her business from cycling the way it would when she depended on her sòl. And Louimène has since found another person willing to buy for her in the DR. The second buyer brings her logs of Dominican salami.

Growing her business is important. All four of her kids are now school age, and although she sent her older girl to live with her mother back in Bouli — the older woman asked Louimène for that because she would now be alone without her — Louimène is financially responsible for all four kids. Lucner’s income is still limited. He is back in the D.R., loading avocados onto trucks with his brother-in-law, but he is still slowed by the accident that brought him back to Labasti for a time.

A couple of years ago, Louimène learned about VSLAs. Former CLM members in her area had been recruited into VSLAs established by the CLM team. We cannot reconstruct why Louimène was not a part of one from the start, but she was eventually encouraged to join one by a friend she has among her fellow graduates. When she joined it, the share price was 100 gourds. When her first cycle as a member ended, the group decided to raise the price to 200 gourds. Since members can buy up to five shares per meeting, Louimène can buy up to 1,000 gourds’ worth each week, which is what she tries to do. She takes out loans from this association occasionally as well.

But folks in the area saw how well VSLAs can work for former CLM members, and the associations began to proliferate. The director of a nearby school established one with a share price of 500 gourds. He and his fellow members decided to make the cycle two years long, reather than the usual 52 weeks. Louimène joined that one as well. Taking out loans in this second association is complicated, but Louimène is happy to use her CLM-founded VSLA for credit and to use this other just for saving. The two-year cycle will end in February 2025, and Louimène already has a plan. She wants to buy a motorcycle that she can rent to a taxi-driver and use to do the buying for her business less expensively.

But she has a new project before her that will involve a lot of expense. The couple’s church has offered to help them replace their current home with a more solid one of rocks and cinder blocks. But the church will expect her and Lucner to contribute a lot towards the one room that they will help them build, and Louimène’s vision is beyond the single room. “My kids are getting bigger. I want them to have their own room now.” When the pastor called her, and told her that the church was ready, she went right into action. She gave the church 20,000 gourds she had been saving, and called Lucner in the D.R.

Even before he could return to Labasti, the church delivered sand, rocks, cement, and rebar. It was all hands on deck, as she and the three children who are with her started carry the materials, one small load at a time, from the drop off point — the nearest to her home a motorcycle can reach — to her own spot of land. Even her little girl was carrying rocks, one at a time, or small bowls of sand.

The other members of her church, motivated by the effort they saw from her and the kids, joined in. “I was so embarrassed. I had nothing to offer them. I sent for a couple of sacks of ice water and cleaned all the crackers out of my business and passed them around.”

By the time Lucner got there, they had cleared a spot in the yard behind their current home to build the new one. They had also traced and laid down a foundation for its two large, square rooms. Louimène sent word to her mother in Bouli that she was feeling exhausted, and the older women hiked down from her home and moved in with Louimène for a week, taking over the housekeeping duties. Work on the home should be finished before the end of November. Then Lucner will return to his job in the D.R.

***

The CLM team tends to point to the training and the coaching that the program includes its most important elements. Plenty of members over the years have agreed, explaining in conversations or in the testimonial speeches they make at graduation that the program taught them to manage what they have and imagine what they could have. Louimène is different. She says that she had a vision when she joined the program, but the animals and the cash that she received as a member gave her what she needed to work with. Hilaire, her former case manager, confirms what she says. And she explains, “Even if you are living in misery, you have to struggle to imagine a plan. If you think something through in your head, it will come about eventually one way or anoth

Enel

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Enel Jacob

Fonkoze’s team started looking for new CLM members in Ramye in late 2020. At first, Edeline and her husband Enel were not slated to be part of the program. The couple was living with their two little boys, a toddler and an infant, in Edeline’s parents’ home. At the community meeting that produced the first list of possible program members in the area, they were not even mentioned. Their neighbors counted them as part of her parents’ household. They did not think of them as a separate family.

When Fonkoze’s work in the area got going, however, the team met Edeline and recognized her need. Fortunately, the Haitian Timoun Foundation, which was financing the CLM program in Ramye, made a late decision to support 150, rather than 100, families. That meant there was support for 50 extra families, and Edeline and Enel could join the program with that additional 50.

***

Ramye is a small, isolated community just northeast of central Laskawobas, between the downtown area and the Artibonite River. The river is dammed downstream in Pelig to generate electricity, and the dam creates a network of small, irregular tentacles of muddy water, which grow and shrink with the season as rain adds to, and irrigation and drought take away from, the river’s flow. Ramye lies among these tentacles, with water on multiple sides. More sides when the water is higher, and fewer when it dries. At times it is an island, at times just a penisula.

The dirt road that leads towards Ramye is manageable during dry season, but it turns muddy when it rains and therefore slick. It becomes a challenging ride on a motorcycle. Steep in places and rocky everywhere, rainwater has cut irregular traces through the rocks. The road passes between little houses and small fields of corn, pigeon peas, and plantains. Merchants selling small items — like snacks, groceries, or laundry soap — sit alongside the path every few hundred yards, their wares displayed in a basket in front of them or on a small table.

Then the road comes to an end.

During the dry season, it’s just a short walk from the end of the road, across some more fields, to the footpath that winds up through Ramye. In the rainy season, however, these fields flood, and a canoe ferry carries residents and visitors of Ramye across. The driver stands in the back of the canoe with a long pole that he uses to push it across the flood water. Passengers sit on a couple of rough boards nailed across the boat as benches.

***

When they joined CLM, Edeline and Enel had been really struggling. The main source of their income was a series of construction jobs that Enel would take in Pòtoprens. His brother-in-law is a builder who was happy to take Enel onto his team as a laborer, lugging concrete or blocks to the masons doing the skilled work. Enel would have to leave his wife and their boys for weeks at a time, but he was resigned to it. “Things are hard. If you can get a job, you take it.”

Early in 2020, just before they joined the program, Edeline got sick. Their second son was an infant, and Enel was really concerned. “I did everything I could.” Enel took Edeline to two different Partners in Health hospitals, and she eventually recovered. But the couple spent most of their money getting her the care she needed, even though the care itself was almost free of charge.

When they joined CLM, her health was much improved, but the improvement did not last. Edeline grew sicker and sicker until she passed away in February 2021. Enel was left as a single father of boys two and three years old. The CLM team decided to continue to work with him in Edeline’s place.

By this point, the family had moved into their own small house, built with the program’s assistance, on the land that Edeline’s mother gave them. Enel took care of the livestock they received. His close attention to their goats kept them flourishing, even as other goats in the neighborhood suffered from a shortage of food during the dry season. Their pig got sick and died, however, and though they were able to sell it quickly to a butcher, all the money that came in from that sale passed through their hands to pay Edeline’s medical expenses. Burying his wife then forced Enel to take on debt.

After her death, Enel continued to struggle. The best way he could think to earn income would have been to go to Pòtoprens and work for his brother-in-law, but he didn’t feel comfortable leaving the boys or, for that matter, his goats. For a short time, he and the boys depended on irregular charity from his friends.

But then his sister called him. Through her, his brother-in-law was offering him two weeks of work. He didn’t see how he could refuse. He could drop his younger boy off with his mother, who lives down the river from Ramye, near Bagas. The older boy was already in school, so he asked a sister-in-law, who lives next door, to look after him. A local teenager had been sleeping in his home with him and the boys since Edeline died, and that boy would look after the goats.

A life mostly away for his boys was not what Enel wanted, though. He knew they needed him. And he had an idea of a way to start a business that would allow him to live at home. He would buy and sell livestock. He would go to the market in the morning, buy low and sell high. It can be a lucrative business for someone who really knows animals and is a strong negotiator. He could start with chickens, work up to turkeys, and move on to goats when he had enough capital. He is also good with livestock, so he could buy sick, low-value goats, and care for them until they recovered their value, and then sell them.

But just getting started, even with chickens, would take some capital, and after the funeral expenses, Enel just didn’t have it. Going to work for his brother-in-law was a way to make enough to begin, at least in a small way. He was also saving money in the savings and loan association that Edeline joined when she entered the program, but he was afraid to take out a loan. “If something happens to money you borrow, it’s a problem.” And the association wasn’t going to pay out his savings until the end of the cycle.

His desire to start and build a business fit into a larger plan. He was not comfortable living on land that belongs to his deceased wife’s parents, but his in-laws were unwilling to even talk about selling it to him. They wanted to him to think of it as his. They told him that they owed it to their daughter’s kids. But even before Edeline had passed away, he had told them that he wanted to work towards buying the land. He thought of buying a plot of land to live on as a man’s responsibility. And he was not yet even 30. Though his wife had died only recently, he knew that he wouldn’t want to live his life alone. He didn’t think a woman would be willing to move into a house built on his first wife’s family’s land. He wanted to discuss a purchase, but his in-laws just wouldn’t talk about it.

And there was more. He couldn’t see himself wanting to live in Ramye forever. He doesn’t like how remote it is. He dreams of moving with his boys to a house closer to downtown Laskawobas. With its easy access to multiple large livestock markets, it would really help him build the business he was hoping to establish, and it would also mean better schools for his boys.

So, he decided to take up his brother-in-law’s offer of work, but by the time he got to Pòtoprens, the work had been completed. There was no job left for him. He had made the trip for nothing, and when he got back to Ramye, he found his livestock in a bad state. The young guy he had asked to look after his animals had not taken care of them the way he said he would, and Enel didn’t really blame him. Living under Enel’s roof, the kid expected Enel would do more to keep him fed, but Enel just wasn’t able to. He was much more focused on looking for odd jobs than on helping Enel.

Fortunately for Enel, because of the CLM program, there was at the time a fair amount of construction going on in the neighborhood. And though he couldn’t get a job as a homebuilder, he could get hired to turn palm trees into the planks that local residents use to wall-in their homes. The job typically paid 1750 gourds for a tree. Enel didn’t get a lot of those jobs, but he got some. “I would save 250 gourds each week in my savings association, and if I had been paid for a tree, I’d take 500 to the meeting instead of just 250 and leave 250 in the VSLA’s box.”
That way, he would be ready even if he wasn’t able to save anything the next week. But as local CLM-funded construction neared completion, those jobs dried up, and so Enel made his next plan.

Settling back into life in Ramye, he began to do well, but not spectacularly well, with his livestock. Fonkoze had given Edeline and him two goats, and he turned them into five. One of the two he received had a pair of kids, and he bought an additional adult female himself. The other of the two he initially received returned to health once Enel took it back under his own control after his return from Pòtoprens.

Purchasing the extra goat took smarts. Enel had received cement from the program to build up a small protective barrier around the base of his home’s walls, but it was too little to do the job. Rather than waste it with a useless half-measure or let it harden in the sack while he saved up to buy the rest of what he’d need, he sold it and used the proceeds to buy the goat.

The useless trip into Pòtoprens had convinced Enel that he was better off creating an activity near his home. It wasn’t a simple matter, but he started finding more things to do because he wasn’t particular. One moment he was fishing in the waters around Ramye, selling his catch to merchants from downtown. Another moment, he was collecting driftwood to make charcoal. He would rent himself as a laborer to builders. When he could find nothing else, he would simply sell a day of farm work to neighbors.

He eventually earned enough from these odd jobs to buy a small bull, and when the bull became a lot to handle, he sold it and bought a heifer instead. “The bull wasn’t going to reproduce, and it had begun chasing people.”

He also went back to his plan to buy and sell livestock. He finally assembled the capital that he needed to start his business by cutting down the trees on a small plot of land and turning them into charcoal. He produced five sacks, which he sold for 750 gourds each. It was enough to start buying chickens.

Enel would hang out on the roads leading to a market, stopping folks on their way. Some people were happy to give him a deal on animals they were bringing to market in order to avoid the need to go all the way to market themselves. It would save them time and effort. His willingness to spend his day buying and selling was his superpower, and he began earning enough to take care of his kids and to contribute to his VSLA each week. He eventually borrowed 5,000 gourds from his VSLA to add to his capital.

He was always careful about his expenses. “If I have five gourds, I know I won’t waste any of it.” And, so, his capital slowly increased. Before long, he had enough to buy goats, rather than just chickens. He also joined a second VSLA. “I could see that VSLAs are good for me. They force me to save. If I tried to keep money in a box, I would always find ways to spend it. The only way to take money out of the VSLA before it’s time is to take a loan.”

One day, just after he crossed the water heading out of Ramye on his way downtown, he saw a sign. A woman just across the water was selling land. The sign listed a phone number, and he called right away. He made a date to see the land and speak with the seller. He asked the secretary of his VSLA to go with him. “I had no experience with land.” They negotiated a sale price of 220,000 gourds. Enel sold his cow — it was pregnant by then — and a large billy goat that had been produced by a nanny that the CLM program had given him. He also borrowed 25,000 gourds from his VSLA and added the capital from his business. In all, it was enough for a 150,000-gourd downpayment.

It put him well on the way to achieving his biggest goal. He had already used his savings at the end of the last cycle of his VSLA to begin to collect home construction materials. He would disassemble the home in Ramye and reconstruct it on the new plot, covering it with new roofing.

But the purchase created problems, too. It ate up the capital in his business, so it eliminated his primary income, and he still had himself and two boys to take care of, a VSLA loan to repay, and regular contributions to his two VSLAs to make. He went back to doing odd jobs. He will be able to pay back most of the VSLA loan out of his savings when the cycle is complete. But he’ll have to add earnings from his odd jobs to finish repaying.

He continues to contribute to both VSLAs. Once he pays of his debt in the one, he can start thinking about whether to use a loan from the other to restart his business. He still owes 70,000 gourds on the purchase of land, however, and it will take a lot of work to clear that debt.

Wideline after Five Months

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We met Wideline in August. At the time, she had been part of the CLM program for about two months. (See here.)

She and her husband were living in a rented house in Hat, a neighborhood just east of downtown Laskawobas, though neither of them is really from the area. And not being from the area means that neither has family land where they would be able to build a new house. They installed a latrine with the program’s help, but they had to do it where they have been renting. Wideline hopes for a more permanent home, but she’ll need to buy a plot of land to build one.

In the meantime, she has been working at developing income. Before she was part of the program, she had been running a small grocery business by buying merchandise on credit. The unrelenting expenses of running her household eventually made things harder and harder to pay the wholesalers whom she owed. She and her partner had lost access to the land they hand been farming, so they were reduced to working in their neighbors’ fields.

When she was ready to receive the transfer that Fonkoze would provide for her to invest in business, she decided to return to small commerce. She bought groceries, but did it with her own money rather than on credit. “When it’s your own money, you buy what you want when you want. You don’t have to worry about paying it back right away.” She works at three different markets: Kwafè to the east, Mache Kana to the west, and downtown Laskawobas. The last of them is open two days a week, so she can sell on four days in all. It keeps her business moving, and she’s now got over 20,000 gourds invested.

When we first spoke to her, she had been excited about the chance to buy livestock, and so she also purchased two female goats with her investment fund. Both goats are now pregnant.

Wideline says that she doesn’t have a clear plan for them, but she knows what she wants. Her highest priority is to buy land, and the best route to buying land is to own a cow or two. So she hopes that the goats can enable her to buy one. She has been saving 500 gourds every week in her savings and loan association, and if she can keep it up, she’ll have at least 26,000 gourds at the end of the 52-week cycle. Between that money and the sale of a goat or two, buy a cow should not be a problem.

Leading a Committee

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Gerbelin Brevil has long been a leader in Do Bwa Wouj, a market community near the ridge that separates Laskawobas and Savanèt, two communes in central Haiti. He’s a farmer, but people in the community look to him for leadership generally. “Someone who wants to try something up here probably needs to contact me.”

The CLM team was working in Pouli, a populous area at the base of the hill below Do Bwa Wouj. One of its staff members was a local man, and he made sure that the team was aware of the community up the mountain from the area where they were working at the time. He also gave them Brevil’s name as a contact for when they began to look at the area. “When the CLM team first came up the mountain, folks here didn’t even want to talk to them until they could say that they had spoken with me. I organized the first meetings. I even found them a house to rent so they had a place to stay.

Since Fonkoze first piloted the CLM program in 2007, it has been organizing committees of local leaders to support the work. Members of these committees are, in a way, selected by the program members. When women are first invited to join CLM, the same person asking them to join the program also asks them who there is in the community whom they can turn to when they have a problem. Some will tell you that they have no one, but many will cite a name or two. The team compiles lists of the names that come up most, and it invites them to serve on a committee that will support the program’s work.

Brevil was named by many of the members, and he was happy to serve, especially when he heard what the program would offer. “It seemed like the kind of thing that I would have wanted to do myself if I had had the means.”

CLM seemed different to him from other programs that he’s heard of. “It’s just different. First of all, they took the time to find the people who really need it. Second, they do everything they say they are going to do. Third, they don’t just give people stuff. They accompany them.”

He likes being part of a committee. “It teaches us things, and it becomes a source of motivation.” He is especially pleased with the savings and loan associations that he and his fellow committee members have helped the team establish for program members. “We need to keep the associations going even after the CLM team is gone.”

His committee has already accomplished important things for the program members, beyond helping them establish their associations. The committee kept one member from selling a pig at the local market without having discussed it with the team. He also talks of members who need lumber as support posts for the hut that encloses their latrine or for their new home and about how the committee has helped them get hold of such posts and of palm trees that can be made into planks to use as their homes’ walls.

But now he’s working on a more serious situation. One of the members in his neighborhood doesn’t have land to build a house on. She’s been living on a parcel that belongs to the Roman Catholic Church, and Brevil has taken on the job of negotiating with the sacristan, the chapel’s main authority, for the member to be able to build her new home on church land.

“We are the program’s eyes. Case managers see members once a week, but we are with them all the time. We keep track of what they do. We help them keep from wasting what they’ve been given.”

At about Five Months

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Lucienne is a 34-year-old woman who lives with her husband and their four children in a house in Nan Lagon, a neighborhood just a short walk from the center of Gwo Moulen. She joined the CLM program in April.

The couple had once been more prosperous than they are now. They are farmers, and they would use the sales of the crops, especially their beans, to manage their more important expenses. It was, for example, enough for them to build a nice home, which they covered with roofing tin.

But the yields have been decreasing steadily. “The last time we had a really good harvest was when my youngest, my six-year-old, was still nursing. Harvesting was so much work, we had to hire people because I couldn’t help.” Since then, they’ve had very little to show for their farming. “This year, we planted three cans of beans, and didn’t harvest enough to make a meal.”

Lucienne has kept her family going for years with small commerce, even without means of her own. She has depended a sòl, a kind of savings club common in Haiti. Members make regular contributions, and every time there is a scheduled contribution, one member takes the entire pot. In Lucienne’s sòl, the contribution is currently 500 gourds — a little less than four dollars — and they make contributions on Wednesdays and Saturdays, the days of the large market in downtown Laskawobas.

Lucienne has been able to use the group because they have always been willing for her to take the pot first. That way, it works as an interest-free loan. She just has to show them that they can always count on her to pay it back. That is to say, she cannot miss paying when it is the other members’ turn to collect.

But her ability to keep that commitment has enabled her to keep her commerce going. She buys produce in the neighborhood, bringing it down to Laskawobas for sale on market day. While down in Laskawobas, she buys products that are available down there and carries them back up to Gwo Moulen for sale. She does not have a pack animal, so she carries her merchandise both down and up the mountain on her head. “When I get home, I am so tired, I can’t even walk into my house. I just sit on the rock in the front yard.”

She used the investment funds that CLM provided to buy livestock. She didn’t have any. She was able to buy two goats and a small collection of poultry. There was enough left over to buy a piglet, though she had to take one that has not yet been weaned. It made it cheaper, but it means that it will take more time for it to start producing for her.

She likes having livestock because she says it gives her a way to take care of a problem if one comes up. “If one of my kids or my husband needs money for something, I can sell an animal.”

She likes being part of her CLM savings and loan association, too. Each week, she can buy up to five 100-gourd shares. At the end of its 52-week cycle, members can have saved as much as 26,000 gourds, or about $200. Lucienne hopes to have saved nearly that much. Because the association’s members take out loans that they repay with interest, she should receive more than what she has saved.

She has an idea what she’s like to do with the money. A decent horse now sells for about 50,000 gourds. If the livestock she has now produces well, she might be able sell some animals to add enough money to her end-of-cycle pay out to afford one. If not, she can buy other animals with the money from her pay out and work to increase their value until she can buy a horse. Not only would a horse make the trips up and down the mountain easier, but it would greatly increase the size of the load she could make those trips with, allowing her to transform her business into something larger than it can be now.

With the youngest of her four children already six, she was surprised when she discovered that she is pregnant. Another woman might say that her pregnancy and her time nursing a new baby will interfere will her activities, but Lucienne does not think so. “I can find people to take my merchandise up and down the hill on market day.”

Lucienne with her oldest daughter, Shelove.

Clenie’s home is just across central Gwo Moulen from Lucienne’s. She and her husband live with their youngest son and a granddaughter. Her husband, Lucien, farms, both their own land and sometimes for their neighbors, and Clenie manages a small commerce.

A small commerce in Gwo Moulen usual means hiking down to the market in Laskawobas and up again. Clenie buys beans or corn. Sometimes charcoal for cooking. She can take loads down the hill thanks to a mule that she bought with a loan that she got from the local credit union. There is a small one in Gwo Moulen. The loan was for 60,000 gourds — about $460 — and the mule cost almost 70,000 gourds. She was supposed to pay the loan back in just six months. Although itt took her a little longer than that, she finally repaid it all.

But having the mule made a big difference. Clenie explains that, in Gwo Moulen, “if you don’t have a pack animal, you have to work to buy one.” It is hard to build a livelihood without one because the main markets are not close by. But in the dry season, things are even worse. Fetching all the water that a family needs can become an all-day proposition without an animal that can carry multiple jugs each trip to the spring.

Without assets other than her mule and with little investment in her small commerce, Clenie qualified for the CLM team’s EP program, a new approach for families wealthier than those who qualify for its traditional program but who might be at risk of falling into ultra poverty. She received funds to invest in her business, some coaching, and membership in a VSLA.

Clenie received 25,000 gourds to invest in income generation, and she wanted to use most of it to buy livestock. She initially planned to buy goats and turkeys, but to to save 5,000 gourds of the money to invest in commerce. When she thought about what 5,000 would be able to add to her business, however, she decided it made more sense to add to her animals, and she purchased a small hog. She will fatten it up until she can sell it.

She is excited to now have a range of different animals. Different animals can serve to help with different kinds of expenses. “Each has a role. You can have a problem that makes you lay hold of one of your turkeys. Another kind of problem just needs a chicken.” She hopes that she will be able to increase the value of her animals, especially the goats and the pig, until she can sell some of them to buy a cow. For her, owning a cow is a first step towards buying land, and she would like to have a plot somewhere down the mountain.

She also used the program to fulfill another wish. She had long wanted to have a latrine. “I don’t know if it was just laziness, but we never got around to it.” When she saw the latrines that the program was helping poorer members install, she decided the time had come. She found out what materials she needed, and she and Lucien acquired them. Then he dug the pit. They called the mason who the program had brought to the area over to her house. When he told her that she’d have to pay him herself, she answered that she understood that. And now she has her own latrine.

We wrote about Rosemitha a few months ago, shortly after she had first joined the program. She’s a single mother. She and her baby both live with her mother, who is also a member of the program. Her baby wasn’t planned. She reports that she was raped as a ninth grader. But she now seems to be organizing her life around how she can take care of her boy.

She received money to install a latrine in the yard she shares with her mother. It is the very first thing that she mentions when she’s asked how her life has changed since she joined the program.

The second change she cites has little to do with CLM. By the standards of Gwo Moulen, she’s pretty well-educated, so the local school director hired her to teach first grade. She asked her case manager whether it was okay for her to take the job, but the CLM could not have been happier.

She likes the work. She spends her afternoons studying the Haitian government’s program for first grade, and the school’s principal is generous with advice. He held a first teacher training for the staff at the beginning of the year, and Rosemitha says he plans more through the year. The post pays just 5,000 gourds per month. That’s less than $40. And Rosemitha knows that it is not a lot. “But it is better than sitting around and not doing anything.”

She received 23,000 gourds to invest in economic activities, and she used all of it to buy livestock. She bought two goats, a pig, a turkey, and a chicken. The pig died shortly after she bought it, but she’s confident she’ll be able to replace it by the end of December, and she’s determined to do so. Like Clenie, she likes having different sorts of animals. Both for the reason that Clenie cites — the need to have assets with different values that you can sell to address different size needs — and because having different kinds of animals reduces risk. If one sort has problems, the other might be unaffected.

She likes participating in her savings and loan association. “It’s teaching me to save. If you try to put money away at home, you can decide to spend it.” She is not able to buy five shares — the most the rules allow — every week, but she buys some every week. She doesn’t yet know what she will do with the money she’s saved, but she suspects she’ll want to buy more livestock.

She just took out her first loan from the association. It was for 3,000 gourds, and she’s using the money to start a very small commerce. She has bought kasav, a Haitian flatbread made of manioc, and peanuts to make peanut butter. She plans to sell kasav bere, flatbread spread with peanut butter, an inexpensive and popular snack.

She has a clear plan for the next few years. As soon as her boy his weaned, she wants to return to school. She’ll go down to Laskawobas on Mondays, and come home on Fridays. Her baby will stay with her mom, who seems pleased at the prospect of Rosemirtha getting her education back on track.

Nearing Graduation in Gwomòn

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Guerdline Jean is what the CLM team calls a “special case.” In the language of CLM, that means that our team did not initially find her by going through the lists of community members living in poverty that we typically compile at a neighborhood meeting. She did not appear on any list. She was not mentioned at the community meeting because she wasn’t really part of the community. But while our staff was in the neighborhood, looking for everyone on the list, they came across her. At the time, she, her partner Anténor, and their first child were staying with Anténor’s younger sister. Chatting with Guerdline, our team heard her story, and they added her to our list.

At the time, she and Anténor had nothing of their own. They had no livestock, no land. When they weren’t staying with his sister, they were living in a rented room. Guerdline would buy food on credit to make their meals, and she’d pay what she owed when Anténor occasionally got construction work or work in someone’s field. They could not depend on having food to eat every day.

When she’s asked what has changed since she joined the program, she is quick to respond. “Everything.”

The cash stipend helped her take a small, first step. “I got 500 gourds every week, so I did not need to buy on credit so often.”

She used the first payment of the investment funds that the program set aside for her to buy two goats. One had two bucks, and the other had a doe. She has five, and the two older females are pregnant again. She plans to let the two bucks get bigger until she can sell them and buy two additional females in their place. And she has a plan for all those goats. “When I have enough, I will sell some to buy a cow or to make improvements to my house.”

She had wanted to use the second payment of her investment fund to start a small commerce, but she was pregnant at the time, and she couldn’t hike around with her wares. She did not see herself as someone who would be able to sell from her home. “If you sell out of your home, neighbors are always asking to buy on credit. Then they don’t pay.” So, she used the money instead to buy a sheep and a couple of chickens. The chickens died, but the sheep had its first lamb, and it’s pregnant again.

Most interestingly, Guerdline also has a pig, which she purchased since she joined the program. She explains that she purchased the pig out of money she saved over time from Anténor’s earnings. So, an obvious question presents itself: Why couldn’t she buy something like that pig before she joined the program? CLM has had nothing to do with what Anténor earns. Guerdline’s answer is clear and telling: “I never knew how to do it.” She explains her answer. “The advice I get helps me see what I can do.”

The couple also bought a house near Guerdline’s parents. “Anténor wanted to move away from his family.” The house and the land it’s on will cost 150,000 gourds, or just over $1,100. But the seller was willing to wait as Anténor sells the land he has in his family’s neighborhood. He’ll then use that money to pay for their new place.

The new house is outside of the area where the CLM team is working right now, but it is close enough that the team can still arrange regular home visits. Guedline takes a motorcycle taxi back to her old neighborhood once a week so she can participate in her VSLA. The ride costs her 150 gourds, but it is worth it. “It gives you a way to save money.” She walks home, but she pays for a taxi to get there to avoid the penalty her group assigns to late arrivals.

Because she and Anténor already owned a home, they did not need to buy home repair materials. Guerdline is not ready to go back into small commerce, and she plans to use her construction money to do so. Her child is now old enough that her mother can babysit when Guerdline goes out, and the older women is happy to do so. Guerdline is planning to buy the sorts of household goods – curtains and bedlinen – that Haitian families like to buy in the last months of the year to prepare for the New Year’s celebration.

Widlande Ruphen lives along the rocky stream that runs through the middle of Grankwa. She and her partner, Orvens, live in a small how with their two young children. Widlande’s younger sister sometimes stays with them as well.

Widlande has been struggling to walk since 2018, and she isn’t sure why. She can hobble along, but she’s unsteady on her feet. It isn’t pain. It’s weakness. She has trouble with her balance. It has kept her close to home for all that time, so the pressure has fallen onto Orvens to be the family’s sole earner. He’s a hardworking farmer, but the couple does not have their own land. He farms as a sharecropper, giving half of every harvest to the land’s owners.

They were living in a rented room and, as Widlande says, they would eat when they had food. They had no livestock, and Widlande had no business of her own at all.

Widlande joined CLM, and she asked the team to buy her goats. She was able to get three with the money available. One of the three died, but she was able to replace it. The three goats are yet to reproduce, but Widlande remains hopeful. At the end of her VSLA’s 12-month cycle, she was able to use her pay-out to buy a pig and a couple of chickens. So, she is starting to accumulate a small measure of wealth.

She has also started a small commerce. She began by purchasing fish from merchants, who bring it to Gwomòn from Gonayiv. But it has to sell fast to stay fresh, and she found it didn’t always sell well. And since she can’t get around, she was restricted to selling in her own neighborhood, where people are already inclined to want to buy on credit. And it was hard to say both because they were her neighbors and because the fish could go bad.

So, she switched businesses. She began buying cookies and crackers. She also makes and sells gingerbread made with the local molasses. She sells them by the side of the road, across the stream from her home. Her profits are minimal, but they are extremely dependable. When I suggested that such a small business might not even be worth her time, she blanched. “I know I always have something, even if it is only a hundred gourds.

And she has a secondary business that has been helping a lot. She and Olvens bought the small plot they built their new home on. They made only a downpayment, but the landowner has been willing to let them take over the land while they pay off the balance they owe. And in the back of the plot, they found a treasure. The trees there are a good source of djondjon, a mushroom prized by Haitian cooks. Widlande can collect 2,500 gourds or more of it every week, at least during rainy season.

Between that extra income and her good management, Widlande has been able to accomplish a lot. The CLM program gave her 14 sheets of roofing, but she bought eight more by herself to complete the roof of her new home. Then she bought 23 more sheets to enclose her house. She explains why she chose to enclose her home with roofing, rather than stones or wood, which are more common choices. “It’s faster.” And she smiles as she speaks of buying the 31 sheets of roofing one at a time, as she was able to set aside the 750 gourds each of them cost.

Now Widlande is looking ahead. She is hoping that the goats will begin to reproduce. Having some that she can sell can help her achieve other things she would like to do. She wants to own a cow, and she wants money to invest to improve the home that she and Olvens have built. Beyond that, her focus is simple. “I want to send my children to school until they graduate.”

After Three Months in Gwo Moulen.

Marie lives in a small house in Gwo Lyann, a neighborhood along the ridge that runs east from Gwo Moulen towards Bwa. Wouj, the market near the top of the neighboring hill. Until 2022, she and her family were living a very different life from the one they live now.

He husband, Prophete, is a farmer, and she both farmed with him and earned money separately through small trading. She would buy merchandise — mostly basic groceries — down in Laskawobas or Bwa Wouj and sell them in Gwo Moulen. She sometimes earned additional income by making sweets that she could sell to school children, who liked them as an inexpensive school-time snack. She also knows how to sew, and though she doesn’t have her own machine, she would sometimes use one at her sister’s house. The couple’s younger children were in school. Two were getting ready to take the national 9th-grade graduation exam.

But one day, she was preparing to do her wash at the water source down below her home. She had been filling five-gallon buckets of water, one after another, because she did not like have to stop to get more water once she started the laundry. She had made hot chocolate for the kids, and sent them off to school. Suddenly, her foot slipped out of her plastic sandal, and she felt a sharp pain in the sole. That pain quickly was shooting up her leg. She fought her way through the rest of her laundry, but when she was ready to hike back up the path to get home, she needed help to get there.

Though she wasn’t sure what had happened, she initially hoped the pain would pass. Going to see a doctor is not a small matter when you live where she lives. There are no roads that lead to Gwo Moulen, the central community in the area, that even a motorcycle can travel. Under the best of circumstances, a healthy young person needs at least two hours to hike up from Laskawobas, where there is a hospital. The hike down might seem easier, but it is steep and rocky in places, so for someone struggling it, too, is worth trying to avoid.

By the time Marie and her family decided that she really had to see someone, she could not walk at all. They made a stretcher for her, and carried her all the way down. She went to the hospital in Laskawobas, which referred her to the larger teaching hospital in Mibalè. There she learned that she had diabetes. Doctors advised amputation, but she and her family decided against it. They couldn’t imagine how she would function at home in Gwo Lyann with just one leg. They carried her back up the hill, and she’s been spending her days sitting just inside the doorpost of her home ever since. Between the loss of all her income and the family’s declining harvests, Marie and her family have spent the years since then just getting poorer and poorer. Prophete earns money selling day labor in their neighbors’ fields, and the school in Gwo Moulen sometimes sends them food from what it prepares for the children at lunch.

At the beginning of June, Marie joined the CLM program.The couple began receiving their weekly cash stipend, and that has helped a little with daily expenses. When it was time for Marie to receive the funds earmarked for her to build income, she and Prophete made a plan. She gave him the 15,000 gourds, and he bought two goats in the central market in Laskawobas. After paying for their purchase papers, the ropes to keep them tied, and a cheap meal to give him the strength to hike back home, Prophete returned with 600 gourds that the couple used for two very small, young hens. They are now waiting to receive the balance of the investment fund. Members generally receive the funds in two payments. Marie and Prophete already have a plan. They would like to add a pig and a turkey to their collection of livestock.

And Marie is thinking about how to get back into to commerce as well. She thinks she could sell groceries out of her home. She’ll just need to depend on Prophete and others to hike off to do her buying. But she thinks that will take more cash than she has right now. On the other hand, she could re-start her business making and selling sweets with much less. She imagines that 5,000 gourds would be enough, and she is now considering a loan from her VSLA as a way to get started.

Marie lives just east of Gwo Moulen, and Rosemitha lives just west of it.

Rosemitha and her mother, who is also a CLM member, have been living there since her father died and her mother moved in with another man. Rosemitha is her mother’s youngest, and her stepfather raised her his own child. “Our relationship has always been good, and I think it always will be good.”

She was a schoolgirl, getting ready to take her 9th-grade graduation exam, when she was raped by a man visiting from the Dominican Republic. He immediately went back to the D. R. She was three months pregnant by the time she took the exam. She passed the exam, but gave up the idea of continuing in school in order to care for her child.

She, her mother, and her stepfather all earn money in their neighbors’ fields. A day of work pays 200 – 250 gourds, less than $2. There are five of them in the home, plus Rosemitha’s baby, because her mother is raising two of her brother’s children. “When there’s food in the home, we have plenty to eat. But we live with whatever we have.” When they can make enough helping others farm, they can use some of the cash they earn to plant their own fields as well. That helps a lot. But everything depends on the days of field labor they are able to sell.

Things have gotten a little bit easier since she and her mother joined the program, but not a lot. While they have been receiving their stipend, they are reluctant to spend very much of it. “If someone comes along to help you,” Rosemitha explains, “you have to help yourself as well.” They buy food with some of the stipend, but they try to save some of it as well. After six meetings of her VSLA, Rosemitha already has 2,700 gourds saved. And she has come to see that she could have been saving all along. She could have worked to put away even a small portion of her earnings from farmwork. But the VSLA has made it easier. “It pressures you to save.”

She used the first portion of her investment fund to buy two goats and a turkey. They are the animals, she says, that are easiest to care for. She hopes to buy more poultry with the balance of her investment fund when she receives it. She would like eventually to start a small commerce, too, but she wats to wait until her baby less dependent on her being there to nurse.

Moving Forward in Bonbadopolis

Murlande Mauralien lives in Fon Pay. She and her older sister, who is also a program member, each have their own small house in the yard that belongs to their parents. She lives with her husband Claudet and the couple’s two children.

Murlande has always been the family’s most consistent earner. Claudet takes small jobs around the neighborhood when he can find them, and those jobs can bring in more than Murlande’s work does, but only when he can find them. Murlande goes to downtown Bonbadopolis every market day, where she sells laundry products: soap, detergent, bleach, etc. She buys what is now about 5,000 gourds worth of product when she gets to market, and sells it by carrying it around the market with her, calling out her wares.

She’s been running the business since she had her first child, and she thought of the business model herself. “When you are bringing up a child, you look for a way.”

She had a serious problem to overcome. She had no business capital. So, she would go from one of the larger merchants to the next, asking them to sell to her on credit. She would bring them their money at the end of the day. It would increase their sales effortlessly if they could trust her. For her part, she’d make a little profit that she could spend on groceries that she’d take home at the end of the day. But she could never get ahead. There were just too many expenses to manage with very little in earnings.

She joined the CLM program, and things have started to change. She has been part of a savings group, and has been buying five 100-gourd shares at every weekly meeting.

This is extraordinary. While it is true she has already received 2,000 gourds in cash stipends, it is hard to imagine her simply saving all of it, and even if she did, she’s already bought more than 2,000 gourds of shares. When asked to explain her success, she says two things. First, that she never had a way to save. But she also points to the training that she’s received from program staff. “They taught me to focus on the profit I make and what I should do with it.”

When she was ready to receive her first transfer of business assets, she could have chosen to invest in her business. She could switch to buying merchandise with her own money or add more merchandise beyond what she gets with her credit. But she didn’t. She plans to do that when she receives the second part of her transfer, but with the first she bought two goats. She hopes they will produce offspring and that eventually she’ll be able to buy her own plot of land.

Guerta Augustin lives with her husband Talus and five of their six children in Bwa Nèg, in Bonbadopolis. She has two older children from a previous relationship. Her oldest daughter is married, living with her own husband, and her second lives with Guerta’s mother. But neither lives far, and Guerta sees them both often. Guerta sent one of her girls, a twelve-year-old, to live with her sister-in-law when that woman became pregnant with her first child. The woman asked Guerta to send her niece to her. She needed help. Guerta understand’s the woman’s need, and she is happy about the way she treats Guerta’s daughter, so for now just the seven of them are at home.

Talus was once the main earner in the household. Guerta describes him as a hardworking farmer, and he would farm their own small plot of land, but he’d also work also for their neighbors. But he broke his arm badly, and though the break healed, he can no longer do heavier tasks. He gets fewer, smaller jobs working for others even as the couple’s own crops have been decreasing. Guerta’s income became more and more important to the family.

She’s a weaver, making sleeping mats and other products out of the leaves of the latanyè, a variety of palm that grows like a bush, low to the ground. More important for her income than sleeping mats, are the saddles she makes, mainly for donkeys and motorcycles. These saddles are used mainly to load five-gallon jugs of water for trips to and from the water sources scattered around the area. The saddles are important for local life, and there is always a market for them. Most are sold even before they are finished. But they involve a lot of work. With her household chores to do as well, she needs three to four days to produce just one. And even the larger ones, for motorcycles, sell for just 400 gourds, or about $3. Those for donkeys, for only 250.

Home itself is a problem, though. They used to live with Talus’s parents, but his siblings were consistently unkind to Guerta. The couple was made to feel unwelcome, so they had to move away. Without a home of their own, they talked to a man who had abandoned his late parents’ home to move into the one he built with his wife. They asked whether they could use the parents’ empty house. The man agreed, and they have been living there for four years, but the man’s wife and his siblings have never been happy about the arrangement, so Guerta would like to move as soon as they can. “Even if we have to build on land we can farm, I want to have my own house.”

As much as Guerta needs to increase her income, you might expect that she’d use the first investment funds that the CLM program would transfer to her to create a small commerce. But that isn’t what she did. “I can’t have a commerce without a home.”

She decided to buy goats instead. “I wanted to buy goats because I didn’t want the money to just pass through my hands.”

And she got lucky. The day she went to market with her case manager, she found someone selling a mature nanny with two young female kids, not quite weaned. She was able to buy all three.

Within a few months, and with a little luck and a lot of attention to her animals, she could have three fertile females reproducing at once. She and Talus have already begun assembling the lumber they will need to build their home, and the goats may quickly help them buy the rest that they lack. But her real plan for the goats is to use them to take care of the regular expenses she encounters, school fees and the like.

She hopes to be able to start a small commerce once she has a home to put merchandise in. But she has another transfer of investment funds due to her, and her case manager might need to talk with her about the sorts of businesses she could try even before she has a place at home to store any wares.

Getting Started in Bedeyenn

Rosena Derima lives in the hills of northern Bedeyenn, the smallest of the four communes in Haiti’s lower Northwest. She was living with three daughters and a grandchild in a small, leaking, straw-covered shack. Her oldest daughter left the granddaughter with her shortly after the girl was born, and then she disappeared. “I haven’t heard from my daughter since. I guess I’m the girl’s mother now.”

Before she joined the CLM program, she fed the children by doing laundry for other families in the small nearby community of Dame or in one of the larger towns farther up the road to the north, Ma Wouj or Jan Rabel. She could make about 250 gourds, which is now just under $2, for a day’s work. If she was lucky, she would get two to four days of work in a week.

When her daughter-in-law was kicked out of the rented home she shared with her four kids. Rosena felt she had no choice but to invite them to join her, even if it was hard to imagine when everyone would possibly sleep. Now there are eleven in their tiny home.

She was anxious to start a business when she joined the program, so she used 750 gourds of the money that she received as her cash stipend, and she bought a sack of cooking charcoal. Charcoal production is one of the main sources of cash income in the Northwest. She borrowed a neighbor’s donkey, and she brought the charcoal for sale to Jan Rabel. She made a profit of 250 gourds.

When she had first spoken to her case manager about how she wanted to invest the business capital that the program would provide, she told him that she wanted to sell charcoal but also to buy and sell goats. As soon as she came back from her first experience selling charcoal, however, she changed her mind. “You can’t lose money with charcoal. Wherever you find profit, that’s where you have to stay.”

So she decided to throw all the 15,000 gourds she would get from her first CLM transfer of cash entirely into charcoal. She bought 20 sacks, and she has been bringing them to market two days a week as quickly as the she can. They sell well, and she has been managing her money carefully, always making sure that she can feed her kids but also that she can buy shares at the weekly meetings of her savings and loan association.

She even saved enough to buy a piglet from a neighbor whose sow had a litter. She got the piglet relatively cheaply — it cost just 3,500 gourds — because she paid before it was weaned. Now she’s waiting to take it home. A lot of pigs in her area died of Teschen disease in the last few years, and she knows that raising pigs is risky, but she decided to try anyway. “A pig can take me out of the hole I am in so quickly. If mine has a litter, there could be six or eight or ten piglets. That’s a lot of money.”

The thing most limiting her charcoal business right now is not having her own pack animals. Bringing charcoal to the market any other way would be too expensive, but her neighbor’s donkey can take just two, so that means it could take five weeks to sell all her charcoal. She will need to think about buying less merchandise next time and investing some of her capital in something else. But, for now, she is excited about how things are going. “I am not going to tear up my hands doing people’s laundry anymore.”

Alicil Fatil lives a few minutes away from Rosena. If you ask her, she’ll say that she is a mother of eight, though one of her eight children died very young. She gave away four of the others to be raised by other families because she could not take care of them. “I see them when I want to. They don’t live far. And they are all in school. I think they are doing well.”

She lives in a well-made cinderblock home with a good tin roof. But the house does not belong to her. She doesn’t even pay rent. It was built by a charity that worked in the area. It belongs to woman who’s since passed away. There was no one in it, and Alicil’s husband Ebert asked the late owner’s son whether he, Alicil, and her kids could use one of the rooms until they could find a place of their own. That was four years ago. “I am thirsty for my own home,” Alicil says. “When you live in someone else’s place you feel hemmed-in.” She shrinks her body noticeably as she says it, as if to demonstrate her problem.

She and Ebert now live in the home with her three remaining children and two of her grandchildren. Ebert is not father to any of them. But she likes the way he treats them. “Anyone would think that he’s their father. If I had known him at the time, I wouldn’t have had to send the other children away.”

Before they joined the CLM program, Alicil earned income by working in her neighbors’ fields. She’d generally make about 100 gourds for a half-day’s labor. Ebert contributed by making charcoal out of trees on his family’s land. But things had been getting harder and harder, because Ebert was becoming less and less healthy. He simply could not do all the hard work he was previously able to do.

When Alicil received her first cash transfer, she bought charcoal just as Rosena did. She bought a first sack, and when she sold it she bought another. She kept saving part of her profit to add to her capital, and soon she was buying four sacks at a time.

When she received business capital from the CLM program, she invested some into her charcoal business. This time, she bought a tree and hired some men to turn it into charcoal for her. She also invested part of her capital in the purchase of a goat. “I wanted a goat so that if something happens to my business I will have something I can sell to get started again.”

And Alicil has a goal. She is working hard to save money in her savings and loan association. She hopes that, by the end of the year, she’ll have saved enough to buy a donkey.

After Two Months in Hat

Rose André. lives in Hat, a farming community between the Artibonit River and the road that runs east out of Laskawobas towards Beladè and the Dominican Republic. She lives in the same lakou, or yard, that she was born in, sharing her house with her two younger children and a grandchild. Her brother and sister-in-law live with their children in a small house less than 20 feet away. Rose André’s oldest child lives and works in the DR, and her second child lives with the girl’s father.

For the past three years, she has been sharing the house with Renold. They couple does not have children together, but Renold has no other children and Rose André likes the way he treats hers. “”He’s nice to them and he helps them.”

Before she joined CLM, she and her family were getting by mainly through farming, planting manioc and sweet potatoes on rented land and planting plantains right around their house. Hat is fertile and wet, so folks with access to farmland can profit, and that means that she and Renold could usually find farm work, even just day-labor, to earn a measure of cash when they needed it. She herself mentions their need to buy beans.

She had tried to start a business. She borrowed money from a community association and bought cheap housewares, like buckets, washbasins, and other plastic items, at the international market in Elias Piña, inside the Dominican border. She would bring her merchandise to various local markets — Mibalè, Kolonbyè, Laskawobas, Kwafè, and Mache Kana — and hike around calling out and selling her wares. But her household expenses were too much for the business to support, and the money she invested slipped through her hands. “I didn’t have any of my own money in it. I had to pay back some every month. And also pay for the kids’ school and feed them every day. The money disappeared.”

Since she joined CLM, Rose André has been working hard to learn to sign her name. The photos below are from Rose André’s CLM information book, where she signs for her 600-gourd weekly stipend. On the left, she was signing with a thumb print, but now she writes her whole name.

And she has also started to make a plan. The team has begun transferring business assets to members of her cohort, and Rose André knows what she would like to do when she receives hers. She wants to start by buying a large female goat. “They say I should buy two smaller ones, but if they are small they can take time to have their first kids. A big female can begin to produce right away.” She explains that she will receive 23,000 gourds to spend on assets, and she figures she can get the sort of goat she’d like for 10,000 gourds.

She will use the rest of the money to go back into business selling housewares. “It will hold up this time because I will have mine own money in it. I can borrow money to make the business larger, but most of the money I won’t have to pay back.”

She has a clear way of saying how she’d like her life to change as she moves forward in the program. “I want to be able to feed us with my own money. I don’t want to have to ask the merchants to sell me food on credit anymore.”

Wideline is excited to be part of the CLM program. “It is a family that’s formed. If I have a problem, I can call Makenson. He’s there for me.” Makenson is Wideline’s case manager, and she likes his weekly visits.

She lives in Hat now, but she comes from Flande, an area west of downtown Laskawobas on the road to Mibalè. “When you’re the woman, you go where your husband takes you.” But she and her partner have neither farm land nor their own home. Right now, they rent the place where they live for 10,000 a year. That’s about $75, which might seem like very little for a twelve-month rental, but it was a lot for her and her partner, Roro, to assemble.

She used to support her family with a small grocery business that she ran out of her home. She sold basic foods, like rice. But keeping her kids fed and paying for their school ate away at her capital until she had no business left at all. She also used to plant vegetables, like okra, that she could take to the market for sale, but she lost access to the land she was farming. After that, she had to support her family with whatever she could earn working in her neighbors’ fields.

Like Rose André, she has been thinking about what she will do with the investment capital the CLM program will provide, and like Rose André she wants to invest both in goats and in commerce. She plans to use some of the money to get her food business going again, but she also wants to get into regular market trading. That means going to the market with cash to buy and then sell whatever seems profitable.

But she’s most excited about what a goat can do for her. “If I have one goat, and can eventually have two. Keeping goats can help me to have a place to live, to pay for school, and to handle my problems.”

Apprenticeship in Education

Essays on Life in Haiti by Steven Werlin

Louimène

Enel

Wideline after Five Months

Leading a Committee

At about Five Months

Nearing Graduation in Gwomòn

After Three Months in Gwo Moulen.

Moving Forward in Bonbadopolis

Getting Started in Bedeyenn

After Two Months in Hat